A storage controller, such as the DS8000™ series of enterprise disk systems marketed by IBM Corporation, manages the operation of disk storage devices by processing requests received from one or more hosts to read data volumes from or write (record) data volumes to one or more storage devices. The data in a logical volume are written to the storage devices as one or more tracks, each track having a plurality of records. A first record, R0, serves as a marker, indicating the beginning of a new track. The following records, R1 through Ri, contain the actual customer data.